Will Politics Crush Civility?

Keith Bybee, professor in the College of Law and Maxwell School, was interviewed by CBS News for the story “Will politics be the death of civility?”

Bybee, expert in political philospophy expresses his opinion about today’s civility. He says that we’re seeing a revolution in manners. “But maybe a better way to describe it is a gerrymandering of the boundaries of polite society,” he says.

He says, “The civil rights movement, in a fundamental way, led to the revision of our understanding of what constitutes appropriate behavior and the baseline of respect.” During the civil rights movement he states, “It was experienced by a number of people at the time as a gross incivility.”

“The very fact that we have people seeking to change civility, that’s an expression of civility’s value. The true crisis of civility is if none of us cared. If we all stopped caring about what counts as appropriate behavior, then civility’s not in crisis, it’s dead,” he continues